Cosmo,
Sorry to upset you with my inexact terminology.
JF wrote: "The increase in drag that you refer to (when a delta flies slowly at higher angles of attack than ordinary wings can reach without stalling) is the dominating characteristic of such flight. Indeed it leads to the notion of the zero rate of climb speed (Vzrc)..... If you slow down to this speed you (by definition) need full throttle just to hold that speed in level flight. One knot (or more) slower and you are in big trouble. You must lower the nose so as to reduce lift and the associated induced drag, which means you give away height in order to pick up speed. Just like the stall recovery case for conventional types. When I left that scene the boffins were seeing this Vzrc as the direct equivalent of Vs for all certification purposes. It is not a stall but it has the same effect as one and margins (1.3 or whatever) would need to be provided to keep pilots away from it just like the stall."
This is why I used the word 'effectively' when I described the process as stalling. Perhaps I should have written:
"looking at the altitude/airspeed/AoA traces you can see that the aircraft departed and spun (there is no doubt that it's final manoeuvre was a spin) once airspeed decayed/and induced drag due to excessive alpha increased beyond a certain critical point."
To suggest that the cause of the departure was control damage (even the BEA does not claim that the controls were not functioning at the time of impact) is as speculative as my suggestion that the pilot mishandled the aircraft (so perhaps you too should support speculation with some facts, or shall we both agree that aliens shot it down with a laserbeam?).
(And to be fair, I don't think my 'speculation' was so very far fetched: "At point 8 (181 Kts, angle of bank going from 38° to 93°, AoA up to 19.5°) it looks as if he'd lost it - and to my uneducated eye, had over-banked and tried to 'hold' the nose up." does it?)
With regard to wings stalling in a turn, isn't the out-of-turn wing travelling faster than the inside wing, with faster relative airflow? In an erect left handed turn which wing stalls first?
To clarify, I'm not suggesting that the pilot should have sideslipped all the way to Le Bourget (though in those circumstances, keeping the ball centred might not have been a prime concern). Do we even know that the aircraft wasn't perhaps already sideslipping, with the constant starboard rudder pressure?
May I challenge you on two questions, since you express yourself so confident that you 'know' what happened?
1) How confident are you that the combination of excessive weight and undercarriage problem didn't exacerbate or even cause the tyre blowout, or, if not that, that it didn't cause the ignition of the fuel?
2) How confident are you that shutting down the No.2 had no effect on the outcome?
3) Can you explain how the outcome would have been the same had Marty traded altitude for airspeed, by not climbing above 100 ft, and had he made a faster, gentler earlier turn towards Le Bourget? Or is it OK for you to speculate, but no-one else.
I don't know the answers, I don't have a firm idea of what caused the tragedy, but I do believe that there may have been multiple factors at work. Why do we need to over-simplify it without evidence that it was simple?